4 ms·

Stupid question. In Europe or the US, we wired the whole country all the way to the most remote house to connect them to the electricity grid. Then again to con

by cm2187 4y ago

Stupid question. In Europe or the US, we wired the whole country all the way to the most remote house to connect them to the electricity grid. Then again to connect them to the telephone. What has changed that makes it so difficult with fiber?

wmf 4y ago
Political will and lobbying.
- cm2187 4y ago
  It seems to be the same problem in most european countries that have different political systems. Doesn't seem to explain it to me.
  - noahtallen 4y ago
    Not sure that’s completely true — I’ve heard great things about fiber availability in Romania, Switzerland, and Nordic countries for example.
    - Thlom 4y ago
      Norway here. Most suburbs had fiber installed around 2010. Cities were a bit slower due to the complexity and cost of running it underground. It's expensive and inconvenient to dig up city streets. But I think most city buildings have fiber installed these days. Rural parts of the country mostly relies on 4G/5G these days as the old cobber network is being phased out. Even our cabins have fiber installed these days ...
  - rjbwork 4y ago
    I forget the name of the phenomenon, and my search-fu is failing me, BUT - there is something like the "first mover disadvantage" or "innovator's curse" when it comes to infrastructure and technology. Compare somewhere like Romania with the US. Sure, the size of the country matters, but they started their modern network buildouts WAYYYY after the US. They US was heavily invested in copper and coax. Romania was able to leapfrog our legacy technology and move straight to fiber + neighborhood based local ISP's. While both technologies performed similarly very early on, the ceiling of performance and lifetime of the line is far higher for fiber than copper or coax (barring physically destructive actions like an errant shovel. So, in effect, they started with something can be upgraded continuously to this day. We started with something whose performance ceiling was much lower, and whose effective lifespan was over 10 years ago or more in many cases. So now that old stuff has to be maintained while doing the capex heavy infrastructure work all over again to get the new stuff in there. Meanwhile, we're still paying them every month and their shareholders are collecting their dividends, so why would they want anything to change? It's not like they're going be able to charge some insane premium for their new faster fiber lines over their old and slow coax and copper.
agp2572 4y ago
Telephone and electric lines are above ground in most of US. I assume adding one more overhead line is easy but just make it more ugly and prone to outage due to storms or bad weather.
btilly 4y ago
We have learned from experience that when you put a new set of wires on, a non-trivial risk exists that existing wires get damaged. And then people blame the owner of the other wires for their problems. This happens enough by accident that cases of intent are hard to prove, but nobody doubts that it happens with intent as well. The result as we've had more and more wires up is more and more regulatory costs around putting up wires.
- octoberfranklin 4y ago
  The simple answer to this is to make point-to-point dark fiber a regulated monopoly, just like electricity. It's illegal for me to start my own electric distribution company within the footprint of my power company. It's also illegal for them to deny me service, or to expand vertically into anything other than electrical local distribution. It would be so easy to do the same thing for dark fiber. Hold an auction, whoever wins gets to buy all the dark fiber that crosses property lines within the territory. In exchange, they have to divest ownership of any business that isn't dark fiber, and must lease point-to-point wavelengths on a fixed and published price schedule to any willing buyer. The electrical companies would be happy to do this. Mine already does, but only for certain areas where they had to run their own fiber anyways (basically along the major highways). They would be happy to expand to every doorstep if they were guaranteed a regulated monopoly just like they have for electrical lines. That would be a big enough market to allow their fiber department to split off from the electrical utility and become a standalone dark fiber utility. They don't want to be an ISP (they had the chance to become one and turned it down). They're just really good at hanging ADSS on poles and want to do a lot of that.
  - btilly 4y ago
    Regulated monopolies have a long history of getting control of the regulation, and then becoming abusive monopolies. All solutions have problems here. :-(
jcrawfordor 4y ago
I can't speak much to European history, but near-universal electrical and telephone service in the United States is the result of a very substantial regulatory and subsidy effort from the 1920s-1970s. Some of this was achieved through regulation (e.g. AT&T's requirement to provide telephone service in all markets that met certain triggers regardless of profitability, which resulted in AT&T charging higher prices elsewhere as a form of subsidy) and through direct legislative facilitation and subsidies (e.g. the Rural Electrification Act and resulting Administration, which offered extremely advantageous loans to rural electric and telephone co-ops). These programs still exist to some degree in the form of the Universal Service Fund (USF) and Universal Service Fund Administrator Co (USAC), and the chunk of money here (called RDOF) is actually a specially earmarked portion of the USF. That said, USF's impact on improving broadband across the country has been somewhat limited because USF's focus tends to be on areas and individuals with no service (e.g. due to rural locations or poverty), rather than improving competitiveness of service in markets that have it. For example, the "Free Cellphone" popup booths you see in poorer areas of the US are an implementation of USF programs to provide subsidized connectivity to low-income individuals, as are the $10/mo ISP plans available to low-income households. This set of priorities is in no small part because, as you can imagine, the incumbent ISPs lobby against USAC actions that would subject them to more competition. But it also comes out of the history of the concept of "Universal Service" which was born in an era when regulated monopolies were the norm for public utilities, and so inter-provider competition was simply not something being discussed. At that point in history, areas with inter-provider competition were generally viewed as bad for the consumer because in areas with competing telcos (for example Los Angeles in the 1910s with LA Telephone and LA Home Telephone) you could only call people that used the same telephone company as you... requiring businesses to have two phones and list two phone numbers. The present world of multiple competing but interconnected providers wasn't really something that was contemplated when most of the regulatory system was built, and post-1982 (AT&T divestiture) the regulatory system has never really caught up... which we can fairly confidently blame heavily on extensive lobbying by both divested AT&T companies (USWest, AT&T, etc) and their competitors that forced the '82 monopoly busting (Sprint/MCI, GTE/Verizon, etc).
maxsilver 4y ago
> What has changed that makes it so difficult with fiber? Nothing. Utilities just got lazy. If an address has ever had working landline telephone service or grid electrical service, then there's no good reason they don't also have gigabit fiber service.
octoberfranklin 4y ago
> What has changed that makes it so difficult with fiber? Unregulated monopolies. Infrastructure that runs to your doorstep is a natural monopoly. All of them -- roads, water, electricity, sewer -- are either municipally owned or else regulated to prevent vertical expansion. Except non-voice telecom.
mattnewton 4y ago
The US is very big and has very sparsely populated areas, to the point where it would take some time to recoup the cost of the fiber and labor to run it at market rates. Without subsidy, the large telecom companies would rather just not allocate capital to it and issue a stock dividend or something.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
HWR_14 4y ago
Most people no longer live in rural areas, and therefore there isn't as much of a driving force to subsidize people living there. And the people who do live there predominately support politicians (in the US especially) who oppose the regulations and subsidies required to do so.
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  Seems like the rural people voted for the people who gave Starlink the winning bid. And now the people who they didn't vote for are in charge and they lose their bid. Not sure you're accurate.
arwineap 4y ago
Large government subsidies, I think it mostly had to do with this government agency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_Home_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_Home_Administration And this grant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act

by cm2187 4y ago

wmf 4y ago

Political will and lobbying.

cm2187 4y ago
It seems to be the same problem in most european countries that have different political systems. Doesn't seem to explain it to me.
- noahtallen 4y ago
  Not sure that’s completely true — I’ve heard great things about fiber availability in Romania, Switzerland, and Nordic countries for example.
  - Thlom 4y ago
    Norway here. Most suburbs had fiber installed around 2010. Cities were a bit slower due to the complexity and cost of running it underground. It's expensive and inconvenient to dig up city streets. But I think most city buildings have fiber installed these days. Rural parts of the country mostly relies on 4G/5G these days as the old cobber network is being phased out. Even our cabins have fiber installed these days ...
- rjbwork 4y ago
  I forget the name of the phenomenon, and my search-fu is failing me, BUT - there is something like the "first mover disadvantage" or "innovator's curse" when it comes to infrastructure and technology. Compare somewhere like Romania with the US. Sure, the size of the country matters, but they started their modern network buildouts WAYYYY after the US. They US was heavily invested in copper and coax. Romania was able to leapfrog our legacy technology and move straight to fiber + neighborhood based local ISP's. While both technologies performed similarly very early on, the ceiling of performance and lifetime of the line is far higher for fiber than copper or coax (barring physically destructive actions like an errant shovel. So, in effect, they started with something can be upgraded continuously to this day. We started with something whose performance ceiling was much lower, and whose effective lifespan was over 10 years ago or more in many cases. So now that old stuff has to be maintained while doing the capex heavy infrastructure work all over again to get the new stuff in there. Meanwhile, we're still paying them every month and their shareholders are collecting their dividends, so why would they want anything to change? It's not like they're going be able to charge some insane premium for their new faster fiber lines over their old and slow coax and copper.

agp2572 4y ago

Telephone and electric lines are above ground in most of US. I assume adding one more overhead line is easy but just make it more ugly and prone to outage due to storms or bad weather.

btilly 4y ago

We have learned from experience that when you put a new set of wires on, a non-trivial risk exists that existing wires get damaged. And then people blame the owner of the other wires for their problems. This happens enough by accident that cases of intent are hard to prove, but nobody doubts that it happens with intent as well. The result as we've had more and more wires up is more and more regulatory costs around putting up wires.

octoberfranklin 4y ago
The simple answer to this is to make point-to-point dark fiber a regulated monopoly, just like electricity. It's illegal for me to start my own electric distribution company within the footprint of my power company. It's also illegal for them to deny me service, or to expand vertically into anything other than electrical local distribution. It would be so easy to do the same thing for dark fiber. Hold an auction, whoever wins gets to buy all the dark fiber that crosses property lines within the territory. In exchange, they have to divest ownership of any business that isn't dark fiber, and must lease point-to-point wavelengths on a fixed and published price schedule to any willing buyer. The electrical companies would be happy to do this. Mine already does, but only for certain areas where they had to run their own fiber anyways (basically along the major highways). They would be happy to expand to every doorstep if they were guaranteed a regulated monopoly just like they have for electrical lines. That would be a big enough market to allow their fiber department to split off from the electrical utility and become a standalone dark fiber utility. They don't want to be an ISP (they had the chance to become one and turned it down). They're just really good at hanging ADSS on poles and want to do a lot of that.
- btilly 4y ago
  Regulated monopolies have a long history of getting control of the regulation, and then becoming abusive monopolies. All solutions have problems here. :-(

jcrawfordor 4y ago

I can't speak much to European history, but near-universal electrical and telephone service in the United States is the result of a very substantial regulatory and subsidy effort from the 1920s-1970s. Some of this was achieved through regulation (e.g. AT&T's requirement to provide telephone service in all markets that met certain triggers regardless of profitability, which resulted in AT&T charging higher prices elsewhere as a form of subsidy) and through direct legislative facilitation and subsidies (e.g. the Rural Electrification Act and resulting Administration, which offered extremely advantageous loans to rural electric and telephone co-ops). These programs still exist to some degree in the form of the Universal Service Fund (USF) and Universal Service Fund Administrator Co (USAC), and the chunk of money here (called RDOF) is actually a specially earmarked portion of the USF. That said, USF's impact on improving broadband across the country has been somewhat limited because USF's focus tends to be on areas and individuals with no service (e.g. due to rural locations or poverty), rather than improving competitiveness of service in markets that have it. For example, the "Free Cellphone" popup booths you see in poorer areas of the US are an implementation of USF programs to provide subsidized connectivity to low-income individuals, as are the $10/mo ISP plans available to low-income households. This set of priorities is in no small part because, as you can imagine, the incumbent ISPs lobby against USAC actions that would subject them to more competition. But it also comes out of the history of the concept of "Universal Service" which was born in an era when regulated monopolies were the norm for public utilities, and so inter-provider competition was simply not something being discussed. At that point in history, areas with inter-provider competition were generally viewed as bad for the consumer because in areas with competing telcos (for example Los Angeles in the 1910s with LA Telephone and LA Home Telephone) you could only call people that used the same telephone company as you... requiring businesses to have two phones and list two phone numbers. The present world of multiple competing but interconnected providers wasn't really something that was contemplated when most of the regulatory system was built, and post-1982 (AT&T divestiture) the regulatory system has never really caught up... which we can fairly confidently blame heavily on extensive lobbying by both divested AT&T companies (USWest, AT&T, etc) and their competitors that forced the '82 monopoly busting (Sprint/MCI, GTE/Verizon, etc).

maxsilver 4y ago

> What has changed that makes it so difficult with fiber? Nothing. Utilities just got lazy. If an address has ever had working landline telephone service or grid electrical service, then there's no good reason they don't also have gigabit fiber service.

octoberfranklin 4y ago

> What has changed that makes it so difficult with fiber? Unregulated monopolies. Infrastructure that runs to your doorstep is a natural monopoly. All of them -- roads, water, electricity, sewer -- are either municipally owned or else regulated to prevent vertical expansion. Except non-voice telecom.

mattnewton 4y ago

The US is very big and has very sparsely populated areas, to the point where it would take some time to recoup the cost of the fiber and labor to run it at market rates. Without subsidy, the large telecom companies would rather just not allocate capital to it and issue a stock dividend or something.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

HWR_14 4y ago

Most people no longer live in rural areas, and therefore there isn't as much of a driving force to subsidize people living there. And the people who do live there predominately support politicians (in the US especially) who oppose the regulations and subsidies required to do so.

edmcnulty101 4y ago
Seems like the rural people voted for the people who gave Starlink the winning bid. And now the people who they didn't vote for are in charge and they lose their bid. Not sure you're accurate.

arwineap 4y ago

Large government subsidies, I think it mostly had to do with this government agency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_Home_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_Home_Administration And this grant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act